i don't get why they're rebooting this series. it isn't like, say, batman, where it had been nearly 20 years since the good installments of the original movie franchise. and it isn't like, say, the hulk, where the makers of the reboot (and i guess a lot of other observers?) said the first version was bad and didn't do justice to the story/character, which justifies making the reboot so close in time to the original.

this is just strange, and stranger if the villain is rehashed from the recent franchise, too (isn't that the case with the goblin character?).

be original! make a live-action movie version of peanuts, with a lunatic serial killer replacing lucy as the antagonist for charlie brown. or something.

I'd be more partial to a rebooting of the Mighty Ducks to where it's a 3 hour dramatic epic about a kid who is kidnapped at the age of 4 and eventually escapes at age 11 by using a hockey stick that was in the captor's garage, and lives nomadically and uses the hockey stick for protection, and then as a result he joins the local soccer team WHO DOESN'T KNOW HIS DARK SECRET and becomes a star goalie.

The delay came as a sharp disappointment, for instance, to Samuel Moulton, a Harvard University lecturer who had bought tickets for Nov. 14 as the high point of a New York getaway with his girlfriend, who is flying over from England.

“She’s a big theater fan, and I’m a big U2 fan, so this seemed like the perfect convergence of interests,” Mr. Moulton said. “There’s too much planning required to rebook. I’m just annoyed that they couldn’t decide all of this earlier, since it seems obvious that this show would be a technical monster.”

Is that the article that references some giant unproven human slingshot device that thus far has seriously injured two actor/dancer/flyers after propelling them into the lip of the stage? And also the producers' apparent shock that all of the stunt and effects sequences need to be formally inspected for safety, not just some of them?

All this work, and it's a friggin' "Spider-Man" musical. With songs from U2. I can't wait for them to do a "Batman"-themed version of "Stomp."

It's funny how a Broadway musical directed by Julie Taymor, a Broadway musical about Spider-Man and a Broadway musical with music by U2 all sound like profitable ideas, but a Broadway musical about Spider-Man directed by Julie Taymor with music by U2 sounds immediately like a bomb.

It's funny how a Broadway musical directed by Julie Taymor, a Broadway musical about Spider-Man and a Broadway musical with music by U2 all sound like profitable ideas, but a Broadway musical about Spider-Man directed by Julie Taymor with music by U2 sounds immediately like a bomb.

What I am surprised by is how much money has been sunk into the whole enterprise...I don't see how it is ever going to make a profit, if it ever does get off of the ground.

i don't get why they're rebooting this series. it isn't like, say, batman, where it had been nearly 20 years since the good installments of the original movie franchise. and it isn't like, say, the hulk, where the makers of the reboot (and i guess a lot of other observers?) said the first version was bad and didn't do justice to the story/character, which justifies making the reboot so close in time to the original.

this is just strange, and stranger if the villain is rehashed from the recent franchise, too (isn't that the case with the goblin character?).

be original! make a live-action movie version of peanuts, with a lunatic serial killer replacing lucy as the antagonist for charlie brown. or something.

It's mostly a money thing. Once Raimi left the project, Sony execs probably asked themselves if they really needed Tobey Maguire and his massive payday (he and Raimi would've been expected to claim ~25% of the gross of Spider-Man 4) when they can just pay someone like Andrew Garfield six figures. And once you decide you're going younger and cheaper, you might as well reboot the whole franchise, because audiences will find it weird if they go to see Spider-Man 4 and it has a whole new cast. "Not making a Spider-Man movie" was of course never an option, because it's Sony's biggest and most important property by a huge margin.

LOL @ every bit of news about this that comes up. It's almost shocking how bad of an idea this all seems, how bad it looks from those pictures, how the word "fiasco" may need to be redefined if this ever actually opens. And "Turn Off The Dark" is the stupidest name for ANYTHING i have ever heard in my life.

Also, whoever upthread fantasized that this would end up destroying U2: hell yes!

Naghdi made the announcement earlier this week at a meeting called “Basij and Media,” in which he blasted “false” cartoon characters, namely Spiderman, and suggested that characters who promote the authority of the Islamic Republic should be used in television programming instead.

LOL @ every bit of news about this that comes up. It's almost shocking how bad of an idea this all seems, how bad it looks from those pictures, how the word "fiasco" may need to be redefined if this ever actually opens. And "Turn Off The Dark" is the stupidest name for ANYTHING i have ever heard in my life.

Also, whoever upthread fantasized that this would end up destroying U2: hell yes!

The show stopped five times, mostly to fix technical problems, and Act I ended prematurely, with Spider-Man stuck dangling 10 feet above audience members, while Act II was marred by a nasty catcall during one of the midperformance pauses.

Yeah I liked the gag in the first movie where he draws all these costume designs and then triumphantly reveals his shitty hoody-based outfit, but it did draw attention to how weird it is that he could cook up the real outfit.

now that I think about it, this is even weirder when you consider that the rationale for organic web-shooters is that a teenage kid shouldn't be able to invent a magic adhesive that's better than anything 3M's r&d dept could come up with

the rooting-through-the-bag stuff looks interesting; it's surprising that there is alleyway-stuff in here that could be outta raimi's film. i feel like they could've gone for some sort of arbitrary transplant (of location, of spider-man's skin-colour per that guy applying for the role a while back) & run with it on account of how recent a similar incarnation of the film was.

i think i would probably watch spider-man regardless tbh. like i think geeky kid gets spider-man powers is just such powerful escapism that i will probably go see. i don't know if the moment-in-which-garfield-looks-nerdily-flustered in the trailer bodes well (emo, hooded, zuckerberg parker probably would've worked better, as a kinda reinterpretation), particularly compared to the bit in i guess spider-man 3 in which tobey maguire starts talking about soundwaves.

will probably see this at some point but seems ridiculously early for a reboot. not as quick as the Hulk reboot which was, what, two years after the first movie I guess. but still, wtf. they could have just continued the series on with a new actor if they wanted to and not started over

Role model here when it comes to tentpole/franchise movie (as opposed to TV) backstories could almost be Sherlock Holmes from a couple of years ago. Fuck a backstory, Holmes and Watson are buds fighting crime, the end.

Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman dispenses with his origin in one page, cos we all know it already. If they want to include an origin in these things just do it a short pre-credits sequence or whatever

The second movie featured one of my favorite movie shortcut glosses, wherein Dr. Octopus essentially mail orders the components to build a nuclear fusion generator or whatever to be delivered to his secret warehouse in Brooklyn. I genuinely love how comic books never get into where these arch villains and heroes get the raw materials to build their bases, palaces, equipment, etc.

It's going to make a ton of money regardless of what I think, but it does look rather heartless and slick. The whole idea of a reboot is so ridiculous when there really isn't much new being added to the story.

since you already said "I've learned not to judge movies simply by their trailers" i'm not gonna give you the same lecture i gave s1ocki when he whined that the Batman trailer had montages of big setpieces instead of character moments ;)

I'm not as high on the Nolan Batman films as everyone else is. I thought Ledger's "Joker" was ALL-TIME as a complex villain, but the first film and everything else about the second film that wasn't Heath Ledger-related never pulled me in.

i can believe andrew garfield and emma stone pull off affects that tobey maguire and kirsten dunst didn't, but as a die-hard Spidey 3 defender I'm so sick of "well at least this doesn't have a dance sequence" bullshit the new movie can eat a dick regardless.

i think the difference in quality between the 3 raimi flicks is vastly overstated, obviously they're pretty different movies in some ways but as far as actual craft or enjoyment they're even steven imo

sure, but right now without the movies in front of me to reference I can't remember a scene that felt like it was shoehorned in from a completely different movie operating under a completely different reality

I think there was some sci-fi plot device used to age Gwen's kids so that they were adults when Peter finally met them? (I haven't read the actual story.) IIRC they were originally gonna reveal Peter was the father of the twins, which would've made much more sense... But then some editors decided Peter meeting his adult kids would "age" the character too much, even though they were adults only because of magic or something.

Having seen the movie, I am looking forward to a sequel. A lot of this was fun but I was mentally doing the "get ON with it" hand gesture.

Emma Stone v lovely and feisty and a good foil for Andrew Garfield, but the 'dizzy her into a kiss' is as crappy as it was in Temple of Doom.

I thought Garfield was more obnoxious that I'd have liked of Spidey in the flexing his powers scenes (mostly with the basketball), but I may just be a sensitive guy Tobey Maguire stan there.

I liked that Spidey was essentially a boutique crimefighter for a lot of the film.

My gf was particularly struck by how off a lot of the lolgeek references were, including using bluddy Bing for a search engine.

Also this movie could have done with some Bruce Campbell, but on the other hand the Stan Lee scene was better than ALL previous Stan Lee scenes put together. And one of the highlights of the generally excellent fight scenes.

My annoyance at Peter being too dumb to really get the sledgehammer "Oh by the way there is a new predator in New York, which is me, and I understand that it can be quite aggressive, because I'll fuck you up" was completely erased by the LIZARD MOUSE!

Which is kind of my takeaway, that they didn't quite line up the gritty and the quippy (the awesome jokes when he's learning his powers slightly undercut by the fact that hey hasn't he just destroyed his aunt 'n uncle's bathroom?).

Also, right - from Ben's point of view, doesn't he tackle the thief for the crimes of running along the street and dropping a gun? I thought that was protected speech in the US?

Also! (I will shut up after this) I was greatly amused by the fact that not only does the reboot have the Big, Emotional, New Yorkers Rally Around Spiderman sequence to match the one pasted into the original after the WTC attacks, but the sequence is based on the massive misapprehension that anyone gives a shit what Spiderman is swinging from.

thought the new one was pretty good, as per usual I loved Emma Stone, thought the twist on Ben's death and Peter's selfishness was really well done, honestly couldn't have cared less about Flash and his magically changing personality

- the web alert system and all of the lizards- how Peter's identity was possibly the worst-kept secret ever- the Stan Lee cameo- Martin Sheen

things that were dumb but I ultimately didn't care about

- the magic webbing, that required a mechanical delivery system yet somehow seemed to be linked directly into Peter's mind re: behavior- I thought the Lizard didn't retain his scientist personality/knowledge and that Connors didn't actually behave in an evil manner when in human form; basically like a bad-guy Hulk

yeah it seemed like it. what i loved about the most recent three films was the guy at the newspaper, who was always in jonah jameson's office, who you knew totally knew who peter parker was & seemed to be very subtly protective of him - he was like an ally of spidey's in the comics (/tv series, i am basing all of this on the tv series) but this wasn't explored or made explicit in the films. i always figured that if the franchise ran longer they'd out spidey to him, or involve him somehow, it was the same actor each flick, i forget who he is in the story (okay I googled it's Robbie Robertson). & i thought that this steamrolled over a couple of really great, frustrating problems from other variations on the story; like aunt may believing spider-man was a nuisance was such an awesome trick, or the public opprobrium for him. but maybe it works both ways. it being an open secret was interesting in its own way, & felt "true", but some of those things felt like they deprived the story of some easy drama, some palpable sense of all of the binds of being spider-man, better at least than the 'great power' speech remix did.

anyway, bullet point style, some other things about this:

- i wish there was a Zidane style movie that just tracked spider-man swinging around shooting webs for ninety minutes, with a fuzzy post-rock soundtrack. those bits were good.

- this felt v unnuanced, to me, very literally comic-book and broadbrush, with so little of the texture that i figured this reboot would go in for including, i guess cf recent batman films - like the new york of this film was just nowhere, w/fictional subway stops & no geography. there were a couple of nice little moments, though, like him replacing the sewer grid he'd just climbed out of. but it felt too presumptuous, sometimes, like it was rooted firmly enough in the comic universe to render a bunch of really basic logistical stuff irrelevant (like, how did this mutant lizard guy set up a lab overnight in a sewer, how did that happen, but i realise at this point i am posting on the internet about factual inaccuracies in a spider-man film, so).

- i thought the dialogue was really bad! like again this makes me feel like an imdb commenter criticising the screenplay but it sounded so first draft. the best parts were the mumblecore (sorry) speechless moments between him & gwen. but seriously the fucking answerphone message? like that's what uncle ben's phone messages were like? "remember you need to mail the letter i gave you, also never forget i am proud of you and going forward always remember the following key five tenets of a rewarding life-"

- i thought it looked pretty bad. like is this what 3d looks like? just one thing right in front of you & then some blurry bokehed lights in soft focus? it's kinda like people acting in front of painted screens, depth-wise.

- the lizard was just the worst. just so bad. like a bad computer game lizard saying PEETEEER PARRRKERRRRR in the exact same HARRRYYYY POTTTTERRRRR inflection every parent has breathed into their personifications of snape. so bad! how does that guy get work! i mean rhys ifans, not the dr. he is qualified but i guess also did turn out to be a volatile choice of employee. feel like i'm discriminating against employees with health issues but c'mon now. i hope he turns up again - i vaguely remember him & PP being pals in the tv series?, as least fairweather friends for when the guy wasn't all lizardy - like i could be into him as a cool old mentor guy. but he was so bad. the british villain.

- the square jawed dad cop guy, this was so dreary. real bad. like '90s buddy movie bad. & all gwen could do was just go sit in a car. like she got that one moment reenacting being a child in jurassic park, stomping around the lab, but could there not have been a spunkier heroine? she just had to be really benign while her dad gritted his jaw. & like his death scene, with the war-movie timely head roll & all. weak.

- andrew garfield was pretty good! on balance i prefer tobey maguire talking about how the shape of the theatre conditions the effect of the soundwaves generated by applause &c&c&c, but his hooded kid felt sorta appropriate, like weird offbeat kids were a better fit than JOCKS vs NERDS for a contemporary spider-man film.

- also just re: the NYers rallying around spidey scene, this straight up almost made me cry. it's really embarrassing, i almost never cry, which is fine, because when bad things happen & you don't cry you tell yourself you just have a different tear duct threadshold than other people, but then you almost cry at spider-man and it feels worrying that it probably affected you more than you life. i liked that part though.

- & i think i mentioned uncle ben's polo neck.

Having seen the movie, I am looking forward to a sequel. A lot of this was fun but I was mentally doing the "get ON with it" hand gesture.

this is otm, like the story wasn't quite disfigured enough for uncle ben running out after peter & a guy robbing a store to seem sorta loomingly foreshadowed.

this was completely entertaining. spidey swinging scenes looked great; I like the first Spiderman but also remember how cheap and awful the cgi was, looked like a computer game. The actual figure of spiderman was so much more realistic here, I can't tell if they used a lot of actual mo-cap or what.

The reviews I'd read promised a return to the wise-crackin's Smilin' Stan Spidey, but we only got it the one time with the guy stealing the car.

But yeah, hated the Lizard, didn't understand why Martin Sheen was wearing false teeth, didn't get Dennis Leary, hope the next film features the Green Goblin so we can have ASM #121-122. So much Superhero Sadface. I thought the Green Lanertn movie was better than this.

sure, but right now without the movies in front of me to reference I can't remember a scene that felt like it was shoehorned in from a completely different movie operating under a completely different reality

this seems a really weird thing to say - spider-man 2 seemed like peter was mooching around between two or three different movies a lot of the time. like in addition to the emo superhero movie and the light-hearted superhero movie he'd occasionally pop into a newspaper comedy and some kind of indie flick about his weird neighbours. the difference between the raimi movies seems like, those were made for people who had seen a lot of movies, this seems to have been made for people who had not seen any movies ever.

like, the new one has a scene where peter can't convince the police chief that curt connors has transformed into a lizard, and after peter is thrown out the chief goes over to an aide and says GET ME EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON CURT CONNORS. or n.b. that after (x) dies there's a shot of him in the rain yelling NOOOOOO, with an echo on it, slightly slowed down.

Raimi 2 didn't feel MPD* to me at the time, which is why I said "I should go back and revisit the movies but here is the impression I had"; you can merge genres together in a haphazard way or in a more seamless way, and the tone transitions in Raimi 2 did not feel as off to me as the tone transitions in Raimi 3.

i def will admit that the dance sequence in 3 was a step beyond the tone jumps in the previous spideys, though i think it was still within the sensibility (which admittedly a lot of superhero fans clearly don't share) and i'm more of a "AND he gave me a dance sequence!" kinda guy then a "WHY did he give me a dance sequence?" guy anyway, most of my favorite directors could be lumped into "for people who have seen a lot of movies"

love that it seems the big sticking point between sony and raimi is that the dude was dead-set on the next villain being john malkovich with wings - i can't blame a corporate monolith for deciding they'd better off spending $150m on this than $300m on that.

i'm still bummed venom wasn't a single-movie storyline, that it got cramped out by the shitty sandman villain. i know this pushes us further into dance scene/the amazing foibles of peter parker territory but the maguire films were v well suited to that i think.

I really liked a lot of the differences between the different movies in Spiderman 2 - the classic pull back from kiss to reveal car being thrown at them is definitely a "Oh yeah, this is a Sam Raimi movie!" moment.

Saw this the other night. Okay entertainment for an evening in a boring town with not much else to do. Hadn't seen a 3D movie before and found it really distracting and not at all helpful, so maybe that colored my impressions, but there was an awful of jarring, jumpy stuff that took me out of the movie. Really felt like it was missing the heart that the Raimi films had, and in any given scene, would bend hell and earth to get the appropriate payoff/punchline for that scene, regardless of what that did to the overall tone or flow or whatever. One of my friends said it felt much more like it was made for teenagers than the other ones, which is striking 'cause Raimi 1 and 2 were huge with teenagers, it was just that you didn't feel weird watching them as an adult.

Lot of sloppy plotting too...like, an awful lot of buildup on Peter being a really crappy kid to May and Ben, and then the payoff is...he brings the eggs? Like, three weeks late? And it's all good? And what was the point of having him make that whole promise at the end, and then renege on it in, seriously, about eight minutes of screen time? Just clutter IMO.

Lizard kind of a cool choice for a starter villain...since he's another guy that gets mixed up with an animal it makes sense that he could be worked into the origin story without it feeling like a weird join between an origin story and another story with a villain in it. But he's a bad choice for a villain in general for the general reason that Jekyll is a lot more interesting than Hyde, or rather, what's interesting about Jekyll is that he'd harbor the desire to be Hyde. Once he's Hyde, he can't do much besides growl, climb things, and prepare to set off the painfully forshadowed Genesis Device (or whatever).

What was the point of the webbing being technological? In the comics it sorta works, since it has to do with Peter being super brainy - - but this version of Peter's not an outcast for his smarts, it's more for being the kinda artsy photo-taking guy. (And he doesn't seem that unpopular really!) So the techno-webbing just adds screen time and troublesome questions: what happens when he runs out of the webbing he stole? Isn't stealing wrong? Does he invent mechanical contraptions all the time, or just the one pointless one for his door that can be converted into a web shooter? Felt like maybe a few bits of different drafts getting jumbled together.

Wouldn't watch it again, especially if Raimi 1/2 were at hand, but again, ehh, entertaining.

peter's room is the most interesting space in the film -- that he's built a whole next-level security-arrangement thing to lock an interior door to some entirely trustworthy seeming guardian figures is a fascinating detail (yes, i'm sure that's not why they did it) -- and then there's this poster pointing you at a totally different totally freudian film about a guy who uses a camera in a voyeuristic way

One of my favorite Marvel themes, which for obvious legal reasons will not be explored on-screen, has been the occasional latent prejudice of Spider-man toward the X-Men. That is, Spider-man, too, is essentially a mutant - bitten by a radioactive spider and all that - yet he doesn't consider himself a mutant like the X-Men, and therefore thinks of himself as relatively cootie-free compared to the burden they carry from birth. Don't know if Hulk or Captain America or Daredevil or other genetically mutated characters distinguish themselves this way. Maybe a comics stan can expand.

Spider-Man is not a mutant though, at least not as defined by the Marvel universe. The entire prejudice arises from people who treat him like one and his objections, not on the grounds that it's wrong to treat people that way, but because he isn't actually a mutant.

Marvel mutant = you are a human being who was either born with powers or had them manifest around puberty with no outside influenceMarvel superpowered being = you are an alien, or you are a magician, or you use advanced technology, or you had an event happen to you that gave you powers

Mutate is a term used to refer to superhumans who acquired their superpowers by exposure to some mutagenic compound or energy (either accidentally or deliberately). Unlike Marvel's Mutants, Marvel's Mutates require external stimuli to acquire their powers (e.g. they weren't born with the potential to manifest powers)

Caught Spider-Man 2 yesterday and got sucked in immediately - was really struck by how much more effective the tone and approach were, versus the new one. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of oddball stuff (the landlord's daughter character is baffling) but it still feels of a piece, and lend the movie more heart so that when Spider-Man has to do something difficult you really feel for the guy. Also love all the little touches that make it feel like it was made by an actual, specific directorial sensibility - - - like when there's a panning shot whizzing by alongside one of Ock's tentacle heads in super close-up, that's total Raimi in horror mode stuff. The movie has a personality to it. Or how when Doc Ock robs a bank and starts slamming Spidey with bags of money - you can tell someone was thinking about ways to play up the movie's themes. So, yeah, it's ironic that the money Peter Parker desperately needs from the bank is something dangerous to Spidey, but beyond the gag, it also points up the Big Idea: the things Peter Parker and Spider-Man want aren't necessarily the same. And it's allowed to pass by without comment or neon signs, but it enhances the film. Lots of stuff like that going on. New one seems so much more by-the-books and Smallville by comparison.

Will concede, though, that the CGI does look a little dated now, which surprises me 'cause when these came out I really thought of them, especially 2, as looking really convincing and real, without obvious seams.

LOL at Oscorp security:* Not having the interns' pictures on their badges* Letting the interns pick up their badges without having to show ID* Using an observable code (as opposed to something biometric) to access the spider cage, or whatever they call it.

This is the kind of movie where the bad guy asks a question and then whistles the “Jeopardy” theme, right after he says, “My, oh my, how the tables have turned!” Where Foxx’s villain, dubbed Electro after he turns into a human Taser, says, “It’s time to meet your destiny.”

Then, preparing to spray high voltage all over Times Square, “It’s my birthday, now it’s time for me to light my candles!” Which is not the only reason Electro reminded me of Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze. Alex, Rob: At the banquet of Hollywood, you’re the Cheez Whiz.This is the kind of movie where the bad guy asks a question and then whistles the “Jeopardy” theme, right after he says, “My, oh my, how the tables have turned!” Where Foxx’s villain, dubbed Electro after he turns into a human Taser, says, “It’s time to meet your destiny.”

Then, preparing to spray high voltage all over Times Square, “It’s my birthday, now it’s time for me to light my candles!” Which is not the only reason Electro reminded me of Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze. Alex, Rob: At the banquet of Hollywood, you’re the Cheez Whiz.

both of these movies baffle me in that there are usually a handful of really good choices (in part 2, the casting of Dane DeHaan, and some well directed rhythmic creativity to some of the action scenes, a decent reimagining for Gwen's exit) surrounded by a ton of terrible choices (script and pacing were terrible like part 1, origin story pt. 2 with dad Parker totally unnecessary, romance elements weaker that the first one, underdeveloped relationship between Peter and Harry, terrible, terirble villains - why did they even cast Paul Giametti? This movie somehow manages to waste Colm Feore - and oh god nerdy old Electro was just awful in every way)

tbf i don't know if there's anyway to ever put the Green Goblin on screen without it just looking awful, DeHaan probably the closest to getting the freakish psychotic nature of the villain. and i liked that they largely ditched the evil executive angle of Norman for the younger version, though I guess we'll never get our film version of Harry terrifying his wife and kids at the dinner table